Muslim reformists denounce extremism; offer a path of contemporary values

Mrs. Raheel Raza shows Valor Award she was
presented by the Simon Wiesenthal Center

During past September 11th's, we have expressed disappointment at officials' reticence for commemorations to address the west's need to actively resist the Islamist movement to conquer and convert the world under a Caliphate. Many of the mosques in North America are influenced by Wahabist ideology from Saudi Arabia. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser organized the Muslim Reform Movement a few years ago to challenge crypto-Islamist groups, such as when he debated Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Afairs Council (covered by DemoCast video here).


Mrs. Raheel Raza, president of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, based in Canada, was honored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Spring 2018. The SWC, which operates Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance, presented Mrs. Raza an Award for Valor for her work in promoting  harmonius coexistence among people of all faith traditions and advancing progressive issues among Muslims.

In this DemoCast exclusive interview from that occasion Mrs. Raza discusses the history of the Muslim reform movement in North America and the issue of overcoming the taboo on criticizing Islamic-inspired supremacism, bigotry, and hostility against non-Muslims. 

Mrs. Raheel Raza video:



Mr. Sohail Raza is Raheel's partner in life as well as treasurer of the Muslims Facing Tomorrow organization. In this video interview, he addresses issues of Pakistani officials abetting Al-Qaeda - including the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who also slaughtered Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, Daniel Pearl, son of Artificial Intelligence expert UCLA Professor Judea Pearl.

Mr Sohail Raza video:


Transcript: Question: Mr Raza, which country do you come from originally?

Answer: I come from Pakistan. I lived my youth and studied there and in 1978, I left Pakistan fearing the rise of extremism which came about during the reign of General Zia-ul-Haq. He imported the extremist message from Saudi at that time into Pakistan and women started covering up, alcohol was banned and other forms of extreme Islamic ideology crept in.

Q: Most Americans are not aware that the son of UCLA Professor Judea Pearl, Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal journalist who went looking for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Were they helped, was al-Qaeda helped by the ISI?

al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in FL
plan airplane attacks on NYC and D.C. (photo: CBS News)

A: Absolutely yes, and that is the sad part. The mullah, the clerics, the mullah and military alliance. The ISI is also disunited in a certain way that the official version means maybe something different, but there are splinter groups that definitely help terrorist organizations because they used them in Afghanistan and they used them in Kashmir. So it is to their advantage to keep them happy and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was one of them- and Danny Pearl did an excellent job in investigating. Actually he went with a friend of mine, Ms. Asra Nomani, also from The Wall Street Journal, a Pakistani (actually a Mumbai-born Muslim), and they did a terrific investigation into Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and eventually it ended up in not very pleasant circumstances.

Reporter Daniel, mother Ruth, and UCLA Prof. Judea Pearl
(Photo: A.C.M.'s 2011 A.M. Turing Award Album)

Q: Why in your view did they behead Daniel Pearl?

A: The first reason is because he was a Jew - and the supposed animosity between Judaism and Islam which does not exist - even in the Quran it does not exist - and the sooner the two work together the better it is will be for the peace in the world - that is the one reason because he was Jewish because he was American and they wanted to make a statement - and they did.

Q: You started off claiming that they killed him because he was a Jew but the Quran preaches otherwise but what's the wider held belief towards Jews in the Muslim world?

A: The wider held belief is that of total ignorance. A person who's spouting hate against Jews in Israel- I can bet you anything he doesn't even know where in the map Israelis or what is the history of the Jews. It comes through total ignorance this animosity and it plays into the hands of Muslim politicians whether in the Arab world or in Pakistan or Malaysia or Indonesia. It plays into the hands because that is the supposed enemy - and it is very easy to build a hysteria and a mob against Israel or the Jews.

Q: So President Trump has declared that he's cutting support to Pakistan. Hasn’t Pakistan been one of the primary benefactors of American foreign aid over the past 20 years?

A: Yes, and one of the better words to describe Pakistan would be a “frenemy”- a friendly enemy. So Pakistan has always played a double game- it has taken aid from the United States of America to build its military. But on the other hand, it is also in the game of appeasing terrorists or terrorist organizations to play its own politics vis a vis India and Afghanistan and Iran to a certain extent.

Q: Who is Dr. A.Q. Khan?

Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan admitted selling nuclear secrets to rogue
states; legitimates global Islamism and attacks on America

Answer: A.Q Khan is the father of the nuclear program in Pakistan. He stole nuclear secrets from the Netherlands and went about to Pakistan to develop a nuclear bomb. And a lot of people don't know that when we talk about North Korea and we talk about the nuclear program in Iran, it is A.Q. Khan that has sold nuclear secrets to both North Korea and Iran.

Q: Hasn’t it been referred to as the “Islamic bomb” that originated in Pakistan - where did he spread it within the Muslim world?

A: Well he wanted to spread it more into Libya, into Saudi Arabia but he was stopped and brought in to check. Now he is considerably restrained but the damage has already been done.

 Q: Israel just revealed that they were responsible for destroying the Syrian nuclear reactor. If they hadn't and that reactor in Syria had fallen into ISIS' hands or nuclear materials, what would the prospects for nuclear terrorism have been?

A: Yes, when you talk about ISIS you are talking about a totally mad and evil existence of a group of people so your imagination, my imagination, or the viewers’ imagination can be as drastic as possible as to what would have happened if this scenario would have materialized. It would have been complete chaos because you must understand that organizations like Isis revere death. Whereas we the people who have some sanity, revere life and that's the difference. So they would have had no qualms into dropping an atomic device on civilian population on children women, etc., so it would have been a complete disaster - a doomsday scenario.

Investigative report finds Daniel Pearl was killed by confessed al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who won't be charged

Investigative report faults
 Pearl murder investigation;
says many culprits still free

- by The Associated Press  American journalists and students find that the men charged with Pearl's murder did not commit the crime;  Pakistan used perjured testimony. 

The four men imprisoned for killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were not present during his beheading but were convicted of murder because Pakistani authorities knowingly relied on perjured testimony and ignored other leads, says a report released Thursday.

The results of the Pearl Project, an investigation carried out by a team of American journalists and students and spanning more than three years, raise troubling questions about Pakistan's dysfunctional criminal justice system and underscore the limits US officials face in relying on Pakistani authorities.

The four men convicted in the killing did help kidnap the American journalist, according to the investigation. But it says forensic evidence known as "vein-matching" bolsters the confession of al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, to having killed Pearl.

The report says at least 14 of 27 people involved in abducting and murdered Pearl in 2002 are thought to remain free. And the four who have been convicted could be released if their appeal is ever heard because of false and contradictory evidence used in their trial.

Pearl, 38, was abducted from this southern port city on Jan. 23, 2002, while researching a story on Islamist militancy after the Sept. 11 attacks. On Feb. 21, 2002, a video of Pearl's killing was delivered to U.S. officials in Pakistan. His remains were found in a shallow grave on Karachi's outskirts three months later.

Within months of Pearl's disappearance, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani heritage, and three accomplices were caught, charged, and convicted of murder and kidnapping. Sheikh, called the kidnapping's mastermind, was sentenced to death in July 2002. The three others were given life terms, which in Pakistan usually means 25 years.

Since then, the men's appeals have gone nowhere in the courts, despite dozens of hearings. Both the defense and the prosecution blame each other for stalling tactics. And there is constant speculation that Sheikh is being protected, possibly by Pakistani intelligence agencies.

Defense attorney Rai Basheer said the prosecution knows it would lose on appeal and is delaying the process, but prosecutor Raja Qureshi dismissed those claims.

"I challenge the defense to come and attend the case properly and consistently, and they will themselves know whose case is weak," Qureshi told The Associated Press.

The Pearl Project's findings appear to strengthen the defense's hand.

For instance, it finds significant discrepancies between Pakistani police reports and later court testimonies, including that of a taxi driver whose account was considered crucial to the conviction.

Authorities apparently cajoled the driver to change his earlier story and, while testifying, place Sheikh with Pearl near the restaurant where the journalist was picked up by his abductors, the report says. But Sheikh is believed to have left Karachi before other men he had recruited carried out the kidnapping.

At the same time they were building their case against Sheikh and the three others, investigators did not pursue leads provided by another suspect in custody. That man, Fazal Karim, allegedly was one of the guards holding Pearl hostage and was there during his slaying. Karim also led investigators to Pearl's grave.

But his account differed from the taxi driver's, thus threatening the prosecution's case against the four on trial. US officials pushed the Pakistanis to restart the trial to include all the evidence, but the prosecutor argued that doing so would give the defense a huge advantage. So Karim's account didn't make it to court, and he was later set free.

The murder case against the four convicts also appears weakened by Mohammed's suspected role.

The al-Qaida No. 3 claimed after his capture that he beheaded Pearl. Mohammed is being held at the Guantanamo Bay US military prison, and the confession is believed to have come during interrogation that included waterboarding.

But the Pearl Project reports that US investigators also used a technique called "vein-matching" to compare a photo of Mohammed's hand with a photo of a hand shown on the video of Pearl's killing, and that it's a fit.

Vein-matching is not considered as reliable as methods such as fingerprinting, but the CIA and FBI do use it at times to identify suspects, the report says. It involves "extracting the information of the vascular structure of a hand or finger and converting it into a mathematical quantity."

One of the more gruesome findings of the report is that the videotaping of Pearl's beheading was initially bungled, and that the killing had to be re-enacted. Mohammed had already slashed Pearl's neck when the cameraman had to restart the taping. The second time, Mohammed fully severed the head.

Two of Mohammed's nephews may have been present during the killing, according to the report, which cites U.S. and Pakistani officials. One nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, is also at Guantanamo and is believed to have been the al-Qaida facilitator in Karachi for Richard Reid, the shoebomber who tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001. Pearl was trying to research the Reid case and track down his facilitator when he was kidnapped.

The report notes that neither Mohammed nor the detained nephew is likely to be charged in Pearl's killing because that could complicate cases against them over the Sept. 11 attacks. The other nephew's whereabouts are unknown.

How exactly al-Qaida became involved in the Pearl plot remains a mystery. The report cites Mohammed's interviews with FBI agents, in which he said he was directed to Pearl by another al-Qaida leader,Saif al-Adel. It also says that Pearl's murder was "the first known operation in which Pakistani militants collaborated with al-Qaida."

In Pakistan, all parts of the justice system — police, prosecuting agencies, defense lawyers and judges — are riddled with corruption and ineptitude. The conviction rate hovers between 5 and 10 percent, according to a report in December by the International Crisis Group. That report also noted that outsiders, including spy agencies, use intimidation to compromise the justice system.

Conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan about the relationship Pakistan's main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had with Sheikh.

As Pakistani officials were searching for him in 2002, Sheikh turned himself in to a former ISI official, Ejaz Shah, at the urging of his father and his uncle.

Yet it wasn't until a week later, on February 12, that US officials learned that police had him, the report says. US authorities told the Pearl Project that they have no idea what happened with Sheikh during those seven "lost days."

"Whether Sheikh sought refuge in Shah's custody because there was a family connection and would, therefore, provide a soft landing into the legal system, or whether it was because Sheikh had a long history with the ISI is still unresolved," the Pearl Project's report states.

The Pearl Project's sponsors include Georgetown University and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a program at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. The lead writer of the report was journalist Asra Q. Nomani, with whom Pearl and his wife were staying in Karachi when he was kidnapped.